Twitter Starts Mobile Developer Road Show

Tomorrow developers from Twitter will pile into a bus and begin a U.S. traveling road show to evangelize the company's new Fabric, a suite of modular, cross-platform mobile development tools.

Introduced last October, Twitter Fabric combines seven SDKs into one package -- fighting what the company called "SDK bloat" -- to help developers solve the traditionally thorny mobile problems of stability, distribution, revenue and identity.

The Twitter bus will stop off in Los Angeles tomorrow for the beginning of a nine-city tour lasting through Feb. 12 to host Fabric meetups and seminars to help deal with those and other common problems encountered by mobile developers. Twitter developers plan a global leg of the tour after the U.S. stint, visiting cities from London to Sao Paulo.

"We're hitting the road on a worldwide tour we're calling Flock," said company exec Jeff Sandquist in a blog post last week. "We believe the next great app can come from anywhere so we are going everywhere we can to help you learn how to use Fabric to build great apps."

Sandquist also announced several updates made to the kits since their October introduction, improving upon the beta distribution tool, introducing a self-service app installation tracking tool, new theming support for Digits -- a free sign-in solution -- and new features for its MoPub mobile ad server.

Along with the road trip, Sandquist also announced a global startup contest called Hatch. "Think you're going to launch the next great app?" he asked. "We want to hear about it. The winning app gets meetings with Twitter executives and opportunities to meet with potential investors in addition to some cash to fund their project."

Developers planning to flock to Flock can get the schedule -- via Twitter, of course -- with the hashtag #TwitterDrive or see Sandquist's blog post for links to individual city events. At press time, the latest tweet at #TwitterDrive came from Twitter developer evangelist Romain Huet departing from London's Heathrow airport for the U.S. tour: "Wheels up to Los Angeles to kick of Flock and #TwitterDrive! See you on on the road to talk @Fabric!"